NCJ Number
138482
Editor(s)
C Feinman
Date Published
1992
Length
226 pages
Annotation
Nine essays examine issues in the trend toward legislation and court decisions that criminalize women's bodies and threaten their autonomy, their privacy, their bodily integrity, and their constitutional guarantees.
Abstract
An analysis of the administrative mechanisms of abortion law in Israel concludes that although abortion is legal in Israel, the procedures required to obtain an abortion result in the control of women's sexual behavior by the reinforcement of normative attitudes toward women and motherhood. This is followed by a discussion of the current debate over abortion law in Italy. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White's antiabortion opinions, which place the right of the fetus over the right of the pregnant woman, are critiqued in another essay. An essay concludes that commercial contract motherhood should be prohibited and brokering criminalized, and another paper examines the judicial and legislative responses and the public policy implications of surrogate parenting contracts from the perspective of a morality of care. Other essays explore the moral and legal implications of interfering with the lives and bodies of pregnant women to protect the fetus. These include an analysis of prenatal harm as child abuse and the societal response to the consequences for the fetus of drug use by a pregnant woman. Chapter notes and references